n strangers--a few, and
mostly men--who spoke his own language agreeably; but he had known
neither man nor woman who showed for it Charlotte's almost mystifying
instinct. He remembered how, from the first of their acquaintance,
she had made no display of it, quite as if English, between them, his
English so matching with hers, were their inevitable medium. He had
perceived all by accident--by hearing her talk before him to somebody
else that they had an alternative as good; an alternative in fact as
much better as the amusement for him was greater in watching her for the
slips that never came. Her account of the mystery didn't suffice: her
recall of her birth in Florence and Florentine childhood; her parents,
from the great country, but themselves already of a corrupt generation,
demoralised, falsified, polyglot well before her, with the Tuscan balia
who was her first remembrance; the servants of the villa, the dear
contadini of the poder, the little girls and the other peasants of
the next podere, all the rather shabby but still ever so pretty human
furniture of her early time, including the good sisters of the poor
convent of the Tuscan hills, the convent shabbier than almost anything
else, but prettier too, in which she had been kept at school till the
subsequent phase, the phase of the much grander institution in Paris at
which Maggie was to arrive, terribly frightened, and as a smaller
girl, three years before her own ending of her period of five. Such
reminiscences, naturally, gave a ground, but they had not prevented him
from insisting that some strictly civil ancestor--generations back, and
from the Tuscan hills if she would-made himself felt, ineffaceably, in
her blood and in her tone. She knew nothing of the ancestor, but she
had taken his theory from him, gracefully enough, as one of the little
presents that make friendship flourish. These matters, however, all
melted together now, though a sense of them was doubtless concerned,
not unnaturally, in the next thing, of the nature of a surmise, that
his discretion let him articulate. "You haven't, I rather gather,
particularly liked your country?" They would stick, for the time, to
their English.

"It doesn't, I fear, seem particularly mine. And it doesn't in the least
matter, over there, whether one likes it or not--that is to anyone but
one's self. But I didn't like it," said Charlotte Stant.

"That's not encouraging then to me, is it?" the Prince went on.